Dorine Olive and Chuck Fletcher have a whole colony of the insects, and it's time for the honey harvest. Like backyard chickens, backyard beekeeping has become something of a trend.

Motivated by a desire for natural, locally produced food and media coverage of the collapse of bee colonies worldwide, people are taking up backyard beekeeping around Florida in record numbers, said Tom Nolan, president of the Florida State Beekeepers Association.

"The press has highlighted those issues, and people have decided to rally for bees," Nolan said. "More people are getting into beekeeping than ever before."

Nolan said the number of small-scale beekeepers, as backyard hobbyists are officially known — those who have 10 or fewer hives — has gone from about 650 to 3,000 statewide in the past 10 years. He's one of them, and the first small-scale beekeeper to lead the statewide organization.

The upswing in small-scale operators comes as commercial beekeepers in the state suffer what Nolan calls "unprecedented losses."

"In the past two years beekeepers have been experiencing losses of about 30 percent of their colonies," he said. "Can you think of any other industry that starts at a 30 percent deficit every year? It doesn't take very long for people to go out of business at that rate."

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there's no definitive known cause for what's being called "colony collapse disorder." Possibilities causes include pesticide and pathogens, such as viruses, fungi and bacteria.

Beekeeping, or apiculture as it's formally known, dates back to prehistory. It's depicted in cave paintings and Egyptian tombs and mentioned in the Bible.

And aside from a few technological upgrades, the process that Fletcher used to gather up the honey harvest this week is essentially unchanged.

The first step is to approach the hive, which is built of wooden boxes called supers, while holding a smoker. The smoke calms the bees and keeps them from stinging.

Then, he gently removes the wooden frames in which the bees have built their hive — all while a cloud of the insects flies around him, some landing and crawling on him while he works.

"At first it freaks you out," he said. "Once your level of fear goes away, it becomes so much easier."

In addition to moving slowly, it's also important to wear light or white clothing. Bees are liable to mistake humans in dark clothing for bears out to steal their honey.

After bringing the frames inside, Fletcher slices the wax off the ends of the honeycomb so that the honey can drip into a barrel-like device called an extractor. The frames are then placed into the extractor and Fletcher turns a handle at the top, spinning the frames and forcing the rest of the honey out. It seeps through a filter and collects in the bottom of the barrel.

Fletcher opens a spigot and pours the honey into small jars. After less than two hours of work, Olive and Fletcher have amassed a gallon and a half of the good stuff.

In their first few months of beekeeping, they have developed some insight into goings-on inside the hive.

The worker bees work themselves to the point of exhaustion for about six weeks, Fletcher said. When they die, their bodies are unceremoniously pushed out of the hive, gathering on the ground below.

And not even the queen is immune to the harsh facts of bee life.

"If she's not reproducing as she should, they'll make another queen, and run her off or kill her," Fletcher said.

The couple don't have plans to sell the honey, but rather plan on giving much of it away. And they already have been spreading the word about beekeeping to friends.

Nicole Fischer, a neighbor of Olive's and Fletcher's, was on hand to watch the harvesting. She's thinking about getting into beekeeping too.

"People need to know how we depend on bees just to survive," she said.